pile of old seats on one side of the entrance. It had been blown off a ride by the looks of it. I nodded and we dropped to our bellies, scooting across the ground, the fog covering us.
Look at us go, like we’d been sneaking around for years. And yeah, belly crawling took its toll on me. I mentally added it to the list of exercises I needed to work on as my arms all but groaned with the effort.
With the fog swirling thicker with each passing second, our passage was covered and we reached the jumbled pile of seats in all of a minute. And just in time.
I tucked in behind a seat, my nose crinkling at the smell around me. How the hell could the seats still smell like puke? The red paint had been peeled off in most places, showing a good amount of rust in the metal buckets that had at one point made park goers squeal with delight. But that wasn’t what had my attention.
The soft shuffle of feet and the tap of a cane made me peek out around our hiding place. There was Penny, making her way through the fog, muttering under her breath.
Our timing couldn’t have been better.
“Damn fools, think they know what they’re doing? No, no, they don’t and now they need my help because the damn fools killed off anyone in their own coven who could help them!” She thumped her cane a little harder, and the ground seemed to actually shudder under the blow.
I shot a look at Robert, who was staring at Penny hard, but he said nothing.
Through a hole in the bottom of the broken-down seat, I watched Penny approach the open maw of the tunnel.
“Fools, where are you?” Penny snapped. “I’ve got no time for this. My water pills will kick in, and then you’d better have a place for me to pee, ’cause I ain’t squatting out here in the middle of the park.”
The music didn’t die down, but a voice boomed through it.
“Penny Hannington, order of the Coven of Silver, you dare come to us?”
I blinked a few times, and even Penny seemed taken aback. “You damn fools! You called me!” She threw a hand in the air, following it with a wave of her cane, and then about-faced and started away from the entrance.
The music cut off abruptly, and a figure ran out of the darkness, illuminated by several tiny glow sticks hanging off their waist. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman as they were wearing a hoodie, hood pulled up.
“Wait! Please. They didn’t realize I’d reached out to you.” The young woman’s voice was breathless. “Please, Aunty.”
Aunty? Maybe it was just a title?
Well, shit. Talk about things getting complicated.
Penny turned and looked at her niece. Or maybe great-niece considering their respective ages. “Beth, it wasn’t your voice on the phone.”
“Aunty Penny, the spell, it’s . . . it’s really bad. We can’t figure out what we did wrong, and now it’s completely out of control.” Her words came in gasps between gulps of breath. She bent at the waist, gasping for air, and my first thought was good act. Not that there wasn’t a problem with the spell, because there could be, but the girl . . . she didn’t actually seem out of breath.
Which meant they were still trying to fool us.
Well, wasn’t that just ducking great. Robert grabbed my wrist tight enough to hurt, and I turned to him.
He shook his head and mouthed a word I couldn’t quite make out. I frowned and shook my head. Leaning in close, he put his mouth to my ear, his very real-feeling lips brushing against my skin and tickling me.
“Ruse.”
It was a ruse!
I mouthed back at him, You sure? He nodded.
I trusted Robert, probably more than anyone else. But how were we supposed to get a message to Penny?
Turned out, we didn’t need to. She had a slightly dubious look on her face as she asked, “What spell would that be? I might not be able to help you if it’s outside of my scope and abilities.”
Penny had told me it was a spell that bound demons to the caller, making them stronger.
Beth looked over her shoulder and then back to Penny. “A spell of transfiguration,” she said, apparently not getting the memo of what Penny was told from the first phone call. “Three of our coven members are stuck halfway between human and animal, and they’re